UC Berkeley top U.S. public, fourth overall in QS World rankings

UC Berkeley ranks nationally as the No. 1 public and fourth-best university overall, according to the QS World University Rankings’ 2021 listing of top American universities.

Harvard University, Stanford University and MIT took the top three spots, with UCLA behind Berkeley to round out the top five universities with the highest overall scores across the four criteria of research, learning experience, diversity and internationalism, and employability.

As for the top five public universities, after UC Berkeley and UCLA, the University of Michigan ranked 18th, the University of Washington 24th and UC San Diego at 27th.

Three other UC campuses made the top 50, with UC Davis placing 34th, UC Santa Barbara 43rd and UC Irvine 45th.

These latest rankings by the United Kingdom-based QS (Quacquarelli Symonds), a company that specializes in the analysis of higher education institutions around the world, evaluated 350 research universities in 49 states. New York state had 74 universities in the rankings, while California was the next best-performing with 38.